How to Discover Your Family’s DNA

Want to better understand your family’s essence? The Winthrop Group, a history-based consulting firm headquartered in New York and catering to wealthy individuals across the globe, says that local historical societies often maintain stacks of vital records that can point you in the right direction to your family’s history—and at almost no cost. Take, for example, the East Tennessee Historical Society, which hosts genealogical workshops that are divided by experience level and area of interest, and even publishes its own genealogical magazine, titled Tennessee Ancestors.

“Local historical societies are especially useful if your family has been in the same place for a long time,” says Stephen Chambers, senior consultant and deputy manager at Winthrop. He says, The U.S. National Archives also houses resources used by genealogists and family historians, and they range from pension records, ship-passenger lists, census data, and material from the Freedmen’s Bureau, which is an 1865-founded government organization that aided freed slaves. In addition, the U.S. National Archives connect family historians with each other during its virtual-genealogy fairs, intended to bolster knowledge of its available resources.

Stephen Chambers says uncovering the family history can help future generations pave their own path more soundly.
Courtesy of Stephen Chambers

And want to outsource the forensic work? Consider commissioning a book or a video on your family by a freelance genealogist. “Content houses have staples of freelancers that work with them,” says Chambers. He names Memoirs Productions as a good example for this kind of specialist storyteller who takes on these family freelance commissions. Expect to pay in the region of $30,000 for a short video on your family. Turn it into a multi-episode story that’s three hours in length, and that could be as much as $100,000. If you’re more interested in a book, the cost can run north of $100,000, depending on the quality and time you require from the publisher. Family Voices Media is another such documentary-service provider. It charges between $25,000 and $100,000 per family documentary.

If part of the fun of all this is doing your own amateur research, then visit Ancestry.com to help you track down your family records. Virtual archives, digital maps, and interactive atlases, like those offered by The History Project, are another way to bring your family’s past dramatically alive.

You can, for example, “have an augmented virtual reality of a house from the past,” Chambers says, and maintain this visual recreation as part of a virtual archive. Archiving family objects and artifacts in high-quality, 3D, digital formats are often helpful when family members live scattered across the globe. “It seems like you’re not looking at a museum wall of objects, but an actual 3D object. You can actually engage with it. It’s more than just a photograph,” he says.

Companies, like Saga Content and Memoirs Productions, are good places to start when scouting for these futuristic services, which are mostly offered to corporations and entertainment companies as of now. But be warned: such 3D creations can start at around $50,000 and run upwards of $1 million, depending on how large the virtual commission.

Winthrop itself does oral history interviews with every family member and intensively checks historical archives to fill in the back picture. After a thorough check-up, Winthrop’s board of advisors and network of historians do an internal peer-review process, to vet the content and improve its quality. “As any good investigative researcher, we begin to uncover things that turn out to be relevant to [the commissioning families],” says Chambers, despite the fact that these relevant facts were often overlooked.

Consider a well-known family that built a global business and prefers to remain anonymous. It faced a cabal of rebellious third-generation family members in their teens and 20s, with little interest in joining the family business. But when the family asked Winthrop to uncover their history, the researchers discovered that previous generations of the family had rebellious members too, and that many ended up working in the family business on their own, eccentric terms. One such member, for example, changed the course of the business, more interested in its innovative possibilities than maintaining the status quo; he ultimately became its CEO and took the business to new heights.

Learning these colorful backstories made the third generation feel like they didn’t have to conform or surrender their individuality, and that a place could be found for them in a business that had since become so diverse. “History can play a role in [family] discussions in a way that doesn’t feel artificial, because it gives very specific names, places, and moments to talk through,” Chambers says.

Costs? Expect to pay some $50,000 for a customized Winthrop investigation of your family history, which could turn into “seven figures” if you have a large, complex family with extensive records across different parts of the world, or if you want to archive stories with the latest technology, says Chambers. There are other options, too. Some private banks, such as Ascent Private Capital Management and Abbot Downing, also provide such family-research services.

It is, for a family worried it is losing its way, a smart and effective way to renew itself. Just think of the way, say, Karl Lagerfeld reviving the Chanel brand back in the 1980s. It wasn’t by turning his back on what Coco Chanel had created that the house again became a fashion powerhouse. On the contrary, it was through intensely studying the house’s archives—minutely absorbing Chanel’s design DNA—that Lagerfeld managed to bring back to preeminence a house then in danger of becoming totally obsolete.

How to Discover Your Family’s DNA

Want to better understand your family’s essence? The Winthrop Group, a history-based consulting firm headquartered in New York and catering to wealthy individuals across the globe, says that local historical societies often maintain stacks of vital records that can point you in the right direction to your family’s history—and at almost no cost.

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